Prisoners in the mess hall at the Islas Marias federal prison island, 90 miles south of Mazatlan, Mexico.
Photograph: Eduardo Verdugo/AP

Mexico is to close one of the world’s last remaining prison islands and turn it into a cultural centre named for a communist writer once held there.

The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, signed a declaration at his Monday morning press conference closing the federal prison on the Islas Marías, 60 miles off Mexico’s Pacific coast, saying he wanted to promote “more schools and fewer prisons”.

He said of the prison island: “It’s a history of punishments, of torture, of repression over more than a century.”

Of the 600 prisoners on the island 200 will be released, while the rest will be relocated to prisons on the Mexican mainland.

The former prison will turned into a cultural centre and rechristened Walls of Water: José Revueltas, after a book the communist writer wrote that was inspired by two periods of imprisonment on the island for political activism, which helped to make him one of its most famous former inmates.

Inmates serving long sentences lived on the islands – known as the Mexican Alcatraz – with their families.

Roberto Gonzalez seen in 2005 running a small convenience store from his cell in the Islas Marías prison. Photograph: Eduardo Verdugo/AP

The Islas Marías appeared to be outliving its usefulness in the early 2000s and its population was reduced from approximately 8,000 inmates after a 2003 riot.

The facility found a new purpose in recent years as the country’s crackdown on drug cartels and organised crime flooded the prison system with inmates.

Despite its difficult past, professionals working in Mexico’s prison system expressed dismay with the president’s decision, saying it spoke of past problems and it didn’t portend country-wide change.

The Islas Marías is also considered one of Mexico’s best-run and most humane correctional facilities, according to the National Human Rights Commission, in a country where jails are often rife with corruption, control by inmates and human rights abuses.

“[It’s] closing the penitentiary that has the only efficient model of social reinsertion,” said Paola Zavala Saeb, a former director of the Mexico City government’s Social Reinsertion Institute.

López Obrador’s decision to close the Islas Marías and his surprise visit to the islands followed a weekend tour of the western states of Sinaloa and Durango, long considered the heartland of Mexico’s illegal drugs business.

He toured the Sierra Madre mountains and held a rally on Friday in Badiraguato – home town of the convicted drug cartel kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán – where he announced plans to pull the area out of poverty by finishing construction of a highway through the sierra, opening a university and providing 20,000 permanent jobs planting pine trees.